An ongoing federal study into alternative liquid-waste cleanup at the Hanford Site in Washington state should focus narrowly on finding the fastest way to get rid of low-level radioactive waste that can’t be solidified by the site’s Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant, a national academies panel recommended last week.
The waste treatment plant, which is supposed to start up by 2023, will only be able to solidify about half the low-level, liquid radioactive waste stored in Hanford’s tank farms after decades of Cold War plutonium production, the panel said.
With dozens of Hanford’s tanks leaking or possibly prone to leaks, storing the remaining low-level waste might not be desirable over the long term, the National Academies’ Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board wrote in a 48-page review of the study, which is led by the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina.
So, the lab’s analysis should be reframed to help decision makers figure out how to “facilitate the fastest removal of the waste from the tanks and into a disposal facility, all things considered,” the panel wrote. The analysis should take realistic budgets into account, the panel said, because “tank cleanup costs appear to exceed, under nearly any scenario, current funding levels.”
The South Carolina lab at the Savannah River Site, in collaboration with the National Academies, is looking at supplemental treatment approaches for Hanford’s low-level waste, including immobilizing them within tanks using concrete-like grout and fluidized bed steam reforming: the technology to be used in the still-inoperable Integrated Waste Treatment Unit at the Idaho National Laboratory.
Online meetings on the topic were held last year between the National Academies panel and the Savannah River National Laboratory. The fiscal year 2021 National Defense Authorization Act called on the National Academies to provide some oversight of the lab’s study.
There are 56 million gallons of radioactive and hazardous underground waste held in 117 underground tanks at Hanford. According to the latest waste tank summary report from June 2021 prepared for DOE, 59 tanks (58 single-shell and one double-shell) are assumed or confirmed leakers, the National Academies said.
So far, there has been no agreement between DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Washington state Department of Ecology — parties to the 1989 Tri-Party Agreement on Hanford cleanup — to use any technology other than solidification into glass-like cylinders via the process known as vitrification to treat supplemental low-activity waste (LAW), the National Academies’ panel said.
The Savannah River National Laboratory has a detailed outline of its analysis so far, according to the NAS review. The first draft should be out in April followed by 60 days of public comment. A final research report should be out by early December followed by more review and – ultimately briefings to federal and state agencies as well as Congress by April of 2023.
